MailChimp Bans Emails Promoting Cryptocurrency

“MailChimp to Cryptocurrency Promoters: Your Fake Money’s No Good Here,” jokes the headline at Gizmodo. The mass emailing service — which sends over a billion emails a day — just updated its Acceptable Use Policy to warn users that MailChimp “does not allow businesses involved in any aspect of the sale, transaction, exchange, storage, marketing, or production of cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies, and any digital assets related to an Initial Coin Offering, to use MailChimp to facilitate or support any of those activities.”
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
The ban on cryptocurrency promotion isn’t out of the blue so much as a clarification of existing use policies… In a statement to Gizmodo, MailChimp further clarified: “We recognize that blockchain technology is in its infancy and has tremendous potential. Nonetheless, the promotion and exchange of cryptocurrencies is too frequently associated with scams, fraud, phishing, and potentially misleading business practices at this time…” MailChimp previously held policies prohibiting multi-level marketing, “make money online” businesses, and “industries hav[ing] higher-than-average abuse complaints,” and earmarked “online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content” for “additional scrutiny…” This follows similar, though less restrictive bans by Facebook (and Instagram by extension), Google, Linkedin, Twitter, and Snapchat on ICO ads, and country-wide bans in China and South Korea.

Futurism reports that the first victims are “responding in kind by attempting to read the riot act to a Twitter account whose avatar is a monkey with a hat,” strongly informing that monkey that “Centralized capricious power is exactly why we need blockchains.”